The Changes Trilogy

by Peter Dickinson

  She looked back up the canal and saw half a dozen men bending and flinging as Heartsease surged around the curve, but they were too lost in the rage and drama of action to think of crowding onto the open bridge, from which they could have boarded as the tug went past. She was still watching the fight when something tickled her neck—a blade of grass. Scrub had reached the bank, but it was too steep for him to climb. She scrambled soddenly up, and with her weight off him he managed it. But she knew she would die of cold in ten minutes unless she could find something dry to wear.

  Jonathan must have known it too, for he was already slowing the tug as he came abreast of her.

  “Dry clothes in the cabin!” he shouted through a smashed window, his face streaming with blood.

  “Are you all right?” she called back, in the accents of a fussing mum.

  “Only bits of glass. Doesn’t hurt. Get aboard.”

  The stove was still going in the cabin, and the close air warm as a drying cupboard. Margaret stripped and rummaged through a big cardboard box full of clothing. Jonathan must have raided a department store for Lucy. She dried herself on a blanket and then put on a vest, two pairs of jeans and two thick jerseys—it didn’t seem the time for the tempting little frocks. Then she started to hang out her own sodden clothes to dry over the stove, but there wasn’t room, so she took them all off the line again and rolled them into a tight bundle tied with her belt. She took the blanket up to rub down Scrub.

  They were already far down the last arm of the canal, where it ran tight against the river with only a thirty-yard-wide embankment to separate its listless waters from the rushing tides of the Severn. Only when the pony was nearly dry did she remember about Jonathan’s face.

  His left eye was glued shut with drying blood, and his lip swollen to a blue bubble, but he hummed to himself as he stood at the large wheel, twitching it occasionally to keep the tug dead in the center of the canal. The main cut in his forehead had stopped flowing, and he said nothing while Margaret sponged and dabbed. She found he wasn’t as injured as he’d looked, and the moment she stopped worrying about him she felt the pain nagging again at her own shoulder. He must have noticed the sudden tightening of her movements.

  “Did he hit you?” he said. “He looked too close to miss.”

  At once she was ashamed.

  “Only one stone,” she said. “It just hurts when I think about it.”

  “You’ve got us through twice now,” he said. “I was an idiot second time; and an idiot to let Caesar go, too. He could have towed us through.”

  “I don’t think they’d have allowed us to open the bridge anyway.”

  “I didn’t think about towing till too late—you get in a mood when you’re just going to blind through, and you don’t want to stop to think. They’re right about machines, somehow—Mr. Gordon and his lot, I mean. Machines eat your mind up until you think they’re the answer to everything. I noticed it that morning when you stopped Mr. Gordon hypnotizing Mother; all I could think of was some sort of contrivance, and there wasn’t one.”

  “Lucy says I killed Mr. Gordon,” said Margaret.

  “No you didn’t!” said Jonathan hotly. “I saw his litter keel over and tip him in, and I didn’t see him climb out. But if he’s dead, he killed himself. Something like this was going to happen, for sure. He’d have pushed somebody too far—somebody like Father with a mind of his own—and they’d have gone for him with a billhook.”

  “Yes,” said Margaret. “But it was me.”

  She stared through the shattered windows at the wide, drear landscape. It was so different from the hills because, though you could see just as much of the scurrying and steely sky, you couldn’t see more than a few furlongs of earth. The land lay so flat that distances lost meaning—even the mile-wide Severn on their right looked only a grim band of water between the muddy band of bank in the foreground and the reddish band of cliffs beyond. And the hills of home, the true hills, the Cotswolds, might just as well have been clouds on the left horizon, so unreachable seemed the distance to them.

  “Lord, that’s a big tower!” said Jonathan. He pointed ahead to where the warehouse at Sharpness soared out of the flatness, less than a mile away.

  “High tide just under three hours,” he added. “Otto worked it out from old tide tables—it’s time we got him on deck. Could you ask Lucy to persuade Tim? And there’s a dustpan and brush in the cabin, if you felt like getting rid of this broken glass.”

  Scrub was standing in the oval of space behind the engine room roof, watching with mild boredom as the bank slid past. Margaret knelt at the engine room hatch; the torrid air, blasting through the small opening, smelled of wicked things: burned fuel, reeking oil and metal fierce with friction. Each cylinder stamped out its separate thud above the clanging and hissing. Otto lay in his corner, watching Lucy and the signal dial. She stood by the control lever and watched it too, frowning. Tim slept in the middle of the racket, crouched in a gangway like a drowsing ape, with Davey asleep in his arms. Margaret hated the idea of going down, so she yelled and yelled again. Lucy glanced up. The oily face smiled, and said something, and an oily hand gestured at the dial. Margaret nodded, beckoned and pointed forward. Lucy shrugged and left her post.

  “Sorry,” said Margaret as her head poked out of the hatch. “Jo wants Tim to bring Otto on deck.”

  Lucy nodded and stared across the choppy estuary.

  “Shouldn’t fancy living in these parts,” she said. “I’ll wake Tim.”

  Margaret found the dustpan and brush and swept out the wheelhouse. When she threw the last splinters overboard she saw that they’d finished with hedges and fields and were moving between sidings and timber yards; and Heartsease was going much more slowly too.

  “Are the bridges the same as the others?” called Jonathan. “One’s got a railway on it. You’ll have to land and open them.”

  “There’s one high one, but I don’t remember the other,” said Margaret.

  “Funny.… Anyway, there’s the high one—we can get under that. And there’s the other, and it’s open. Lord, that is a big tower!”

  The huge, windowless column of concrete on the south side of the dock came nearer and nearer. The canal widened as it curved. Around the corner lay the big ship which had so astonished Margaret; Heartsease seemed like a dinghy beside it. Then, right across the water, ran a low, dark line with a frill of railing above it in one place. The line was the quay at the bottom of the docks, and the frill was the guardrails for the narrow footpath on top of the lock gates. It was here the canal ended—and their escape, too, if they couldn’t find how to open the lock gates.

  Chapter 9

  WILD WATER

  Otto lay out on deck beside Scrub, as pale as plaster with his illness and long hiding from daylight. Tim knelt by him, bubbling worriedly—and Margaret thought that the paleness might also be pain, the pain of being heaved with ribs half mended up a vertical iron ladder. But he smiled wickedly at her as she walked aft.

  “Hi, Heroine of the Resistance,” he said. “I sure wish I’d taken a movie of you playing your bull, just to show the folks back home. You look like a girl back home, too, in that rig. Nice.”

  Margaret felt herself flush, and glanced down at her primrose-yellow jersey and scarlet jeans. They made her feel like someone else.

  “Pity your own folk can’t see you,” said Otto.

  “Uncle Peter would whip me if he did,” said Margaret. “And strangers would throw things at me. Women mustn’t wear trousers—it’s wicked.”

  “And what do you—” Otto began. “Hey! How do we know the Horse of the Resistance won’t step on me?”

  “He’s much too clever,” laughed Margaret. “Did it hurt a lot being carried up?”

  “So-so,” he said, “but Tim … hold tight! He’s misjudged it!”

  The tug swung suddenly, and then the whole length of it jarred as it thudded into the quay. Margaret was flung to the deck, almost putting her arm through the
glass of the engine room roof. As she went down she saw Scrub prancing sideways toward Otto in a desperate attempt to keep upright; but when she rose he’d stopped, with his forelegs actually astride the sick man. Delicately he moved himself away.

  “I told you he was clever,” said Margaret with a shudder.

  “Sorry!” called Jonathan from the wheelhouse. “I made a mess of that. Is Lucy all right?”

  “Fair enough,” answered Lucy, poking her head through the hatch. “I burned my arm on that engine of yours, but not enough to notice.”

  “Margaret can put some cream on it,” said Jonathan. “In the first-aid bag in the cabin, Marge. But first, Lucy, can you get Tim to carry Otto ashore to look at the sluices?”

  Tim thought it was an unwise move. Margaret was astonished by how much you could tell from the tone of his bubbling and the way he moved his head; now he was arguing that his patient had been under quite enough of a strain coming up from the engine room, and must rest before he attempted anything else. He began to back away as Lucy talked softly to him.

  “Ah, come on, Tim, my old pal,” said Otto suddenly. “I can stand it if you can.”

  Tim stopped backing away and knelt beside him, making little worried noises.

  “Ah, come on,” said Otto gently. “Jo’s been stoned, Marge has fought a mad bull, Lucy’s kept that engine going all morning—why can’t I earn my medal too?”

  Tim slithered an arm beneath his shoulders and another beneath his thighs and picked him up tenderly. He must have been very light with illness, as light as a dry bone. Margaret took Lucy below to dress her burn, which was a nasty patch of dead whiteness surrounded by angry red on the inside of her left forearm. There were aspirins, too, in the bag—Jonathan must have raided half the shops in Gloucester. Lucy grimaced as she chewed them up.

  “D’you think I’m doing right, Miss Margaret?” said Lucy.

  “How?”

  “Taking Tim to America. Otto doesn’t think they can make him clever, not like you nor me, but they might find drugs for him which’d make him two parts well; and Otto’s uncle has a farm where we can live, he says. But what frights me is they might take Tim away and shut him up with a lot of other zanies—they wouldn’t do that, would they?”

  “Not if Otto says they won’t. He owes you a lot—both of you.”

  “Aye,” sighed Lucy. “But will they listen to him?”

  “I wish I weren’t going,” said Margaret. “I wish none of this had ever happened. It’s awful knowing nothing can ever be smooth and easy again.”

  Lucy grinned—not her usual secret smile but a real grin.

  “I reckon we got no choice,” she said. “Neither you nor me. Master Jonathan blows us along like feathers in the breeze. Let’s look what he’s at now.”

  Jonathan was down a deep hole in the quayside; the hole had a lid, which they’d opened, and Otto was propped on the rusting lip of iron which surrounded it.

  “It’s hydraulic,” called Otto, “so there must be some kind of cylinder with a piston in it and a shaft. Then the shaft might thrust down on an arm and the other end of that might haul the sluice up. They’d be sure to have fixed it so you could haul it up by hand, in case the hydraulics failed. See anything?”

  “I’ve got the main cylinder,” said Jonathan as matter-of-factly as if he were talking about laying the supper table. “But the rest of it’s not … oh, I see. How far would the sluice travel, do you think?”

  “Four, five feet, I guess. Could be only two or three, if it’s broad enough.”

  “That’s it, then. There’s two rings which’d take a hook, one to shut and one to open. I can’t begin to shift it, though.”

  “Don’t try,” called Otto urgently. “Fetch out that block and tackle you looted from the garage. We’ll put a beam across.”

  Jonathan popped out of the hole and began scampering to the tug. All he’d done since yesterday evening didn’t seem to have slowed him down at all.

  “Come and help, Marge,” he called as he disappeared down the cabin hatch.

  By the time she got there he was handing up a thing which didn’t look any use at all, made of two hooks and two pulley wheels and a great tangle of rusty chain. Margaret struggled with the heavy and awkward mess of metal back to where Otto lay, while Jonathan rabbited down into the engine room.

  “Is there more of it?” she asked Otto.

  “No, that’s all. It ought to do the trick—got a twenty-to-one ratio, just about.”

  “Then we’ve still got to find something strong to lift it—Scrub could pull, I suppose.”

  “No need,” he said, grinning. “See where the chains run over that top wheel? That pulley’s double, and one side of it’s a mite smaller than the other, so when the pulley goes round the loop in the middle, that bit there which the other pulley hangs from gets slowly bigger or smaller. But you’ve got to pull the chain outside the pulley a good yard to make the loop a couple of inches smaller, so you’re pulling about twenty times as hard. You can lift twenty times your own weight. Got it?”

  “No,” said Margaret.

  “You’ll see,” said Otto. “What’s the gas for, Jo?”

  Jonathan was bending beneath the weight of two big cans, just the same shape and size as the one he’d used to scatter petrol over the stones the night the whole fearful adventure began.

  “Gas?” he said, putting them down. “It’s petrol. Marge, will you and Lucy take a can each up to where the timber piles are thickest; there’ll be men hunting us down from Purton soon. I saw a boat on the canal up there, so I think they’ll cross and come down the towpath. Pull a lot of planks out across the path, spray the petrol about, stand back and throw a lit rag on to it. Take rags and matches. Then go and do the same thing on the road the other side of the sheds—there’s more timber beyond it, and if you can get it really blazing they’ll never get through. I may have to harness Scrub to the capstan to open the gates—d’you think he’ll do it for me if you aren’t back?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Margaret. “How much have you got to do?”

  “Shut the bottom sluice, open the top one, open the top gate when the water’s level—it’s only got about four foot to come up because the tide’s high in the basin—put Heartsease in the lock, shut the top gate, shut the top sluice, open the bottom one, let the water go down again, open the bottom gate and we’re out. Hurry up, though—I can’t move Heartsease without Lucy in the engine room.”

  The girls trudged up beside the dock, straining sideways under the twenty-pound weight of the petrol cans. The wind bit at the backs of their necks and fingered icily through their clothes in spite of the exercise.

  “Fine breeze for a bonfire,” whispered Lucy.

  Margaret did most of the timber hauling, but she didn’t mind because Lucy seemed happy to handle the petrol. It was hard work, but quick once she’d found a stack of planks light enough for her to run out across the quay in a single movement. At the back of the shed the road and railway ran side by side, making a forty-foot gap before the further sheds. The girls toiled away, one on each side of the road, hauling out planks to make a barrier of fire, until Margaret saw that they were going about the job in an un-Jonathan-like way.

  “That’s enough,” she said. “We’ll never be able to pull out so much that there’s fire right across the road. But if the sheds really catch it’ll be too hot to get through.”

  “Right,” said Lucy. “Shall I start this end, then? Wind’s going round a bit, I fancy. Ugh! Wicked stuff, this petrol. You stand back, Miss Margaret, while I see what I can do with it.”

  She soaked several rags, scattered half of one can all over Margaret’s pile and the wood beside it in the stack, then the other half over her own. In the shelter of the stacks the harsh wind eddied, blowing the weird reek about them. Lucy tied a stone into a soaked rag so clumsily that Margaret was sure it would fall out. She lit it and threw.

  Half a second’s hesitation, and with a bellowing sigh the spre
ad petrol exploded. In ten seconds the pile was blazing like a hayrick, huge sparks spiraling upward in the draft. One of these must have fallen into the second pile, for it exploded while Lucy was still tying another stone into a rag. Margaret picked up the other can and ran between the stacked planks to the quayside. Already they could hear the coarse roar of fire eating into the piled hills of old pine, dry with five summers, sheltered by the shed roofs from five winters. By the dock Lucy splashed the petrol about as though she were watering a greenhouse. The wind, still shifting around toward the northeast, smothered them with an eddy of smoke from the first fire, and in the gap that followed it Margaret thought she saw through her choking tears a movement far up the canal—a troop of men marching down the towpath; but the same booming whoosh of fire blotted out land and water.

  The flames at the far end of the shed were already higher than the roof. Smoke piled skyward like a storm cloud. Timber stacks which they hadn’t even touched were alight in a dozen places. Heat poured toward them on the wind, like a flatiron held close to the cheek. They ran back to the lock. The gates at the top were open.

  “I thought I saw men coming down the towpath,” gasped Margaret.

  “Me too,” said Lucy. “Nigh on a score of them.”

  “They won’t get through that lot,” said Jonathan, nodding toward the inferno of the timber yard. “Lucy, will you go and be engineer while we get her into the lock? Marge, as soon as she’s in will you make Scrub haul on that capstan bar to close the gate? Otto and Tim might as well wait here.”

  As the tug nosed through the narrow gap left by the single gate being opened, Margaret studied her next job. The capstan was really a large iron cogwheel in a hole in the ground, protected by an iron lid which Jonathan had opened; below it lay inexplicable machinery; from the cog a stout wooden bar about seven feet long stuck out sideways, shaped so that it rose just clear of the rim of the hole. Scrub was harnessed on awkwardly short traces to the end of this pole: if he pulled hard enough, the cog would turn.